This book re-explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s “critique of nihilism” through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze. A Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche is motivated by a post-deconstructive style of interpretation, in as much as Deleuze goes beyond, or in between, hermeneutics and deconstruction. The book is not about Deleuze’s reading per se; rather, it is an appraisal of Nietzsche’s “critique of nihilism” using Deleuze’s experimental reading. As such, the book is an experiment in itself, as it shows how to partly gloss Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism through Deleuzian phraseology. The critique of nihilism is the book’s basis for introducing Nietzsche’s ethics and ontology. Appraising Nietzsche’s ethics and ontology amounts to clarifying what Deleuze defines as the movement from the “dogmatic image of thought” to the “new image of thought.” Through this new image of thought, Deleuze makes sense of a Nietzschean counterculture, which is a perspective that resists traditional or representational metaphysics. Deleuze takes the reversal of Platonism, or the transmutation of values, to be the point of departure. By abandoning the old image of thought, we are able to free ourselves from the obscurantism of foundationalist or essentialist thinking. It is only through the transmutation of values that Nietzsche’s ethics of affirmation and ontology of becoming would make sense. Through Deleuze, we are able to avoid reading Nietzsche as a moral philosopher and metaphysician. Rather, we are able to read Nietzsche as one espousing an ethical imperative through the thought of the eternal return and one advocating a theory of existence based on an immanent, as opposed to transcendent, image of the world.
